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Will keep the comments section for this page brief, final page of the chapter will be up tonight, and the full 45-pg original pencilled comic PDF will be up for Patrons then as well. See you in a few hours~

Oh, no, honey. Being royalty has not treated her well. First it was all that stupid Pasori disappointment about her gender, and now she’s basically just getting tossed aside like an inconvenience. Like, I guess that dude is technically (and dubiously) Luca’s best friend, but that isn’t saying much.

Just weird as hell. I hope she manages to strike back somehow. She clearly had active interest in finding love the proper way, based on her dreams.

I hope the sleeve/shoulder/’Miss Rana’ shout at her just showed her passing by random people on her way up to the tower and the last panel turns out to be Suda stopping her from doing anything stupid like the stand-up brother he is.

But.. but… Rana is not a 21st century American girl! In her culture she’s of marriageable age and the parents choose their daughter’s husbands. AND she’s a princess. Princess’ marriages are political, even in our world. Surely she can’t have expected to pick her own husband? Has she been living in a rosy cloud all her life? Even if Luca is a difficult father, she had an intelligent and compassionate mother for 17 years. Surely Phe TALKED to her daughter now and then? Surely she must’ve had some lessons which covered history, culture and… surely she must’ve grown up with stories and songs in which arranged marriages were the norm?

WHY IS SHE SO SURPRISED?!! WHY DOES SHE THINK THAT HER MARRIAGE BEING ARRANGED IS SOMETHING LUCA DOES OUT OF HATRED TOWARDS HER?!!

This is what annoyed the heck out of me in that Pixar movie ‘Brave’. The anachronism of a Celtic Princess of the third century AD behaving like an American girl of the 21th century.

There has never been an Emperor like Luca before… and never children like the royal kids. In Pasori culture there can be arranged marriages and outright selling of children, but again they are extremely far from Pasori culture. They were raised culturally a lot closer to Santri people like Phe, and more modern expectations of personal freedom. With Phe in the picture, Rana also had some model for personal expression and the right to choose the path her life went, as both her parents did. There is also no obvious suitor for her given that her father technically has no equal… so yeah, not the 21st century, but not exactly medieval times either. There hasn’t been a situation like this before and her mother would never have allowed Luca to do what he just did, so it is a betrayal.

Thanks for the explanation, this makes a lot of sense. This is the “first” royal family so they wouldn’t have that many pre-established notions like “of course my marriage will be arranged” or “I’ve been betrothed since I was five, I can’t take any of my crushes seriously.” This also explains why Suda is so shocked by his father’s “divine right” as an emperor to just straight-up murder the captain.